Alumni and Friends Fund

At Cambridge we provide History students with an intensive education. It’s costly, and modest gifts can make a real difference to the student experience.

The History Faculty Alumni and Friends Fund exists to help in three ways:

To support travel for undergraduates researching their final year dissertations.

To support postgraduates attending conferences and workshops and in building interdisciplinary and transnational networks.

To provide bursaries and studentships for Master’s students.

Let us explain a little more:

Final year dissertations can be the most fulfilling element in the undergraduate course, a unique and personal investigation into anything from medieval estate management to sectarianism in modern Glasgow. The very best are published. Our History degree brings students within three years to the coalface of professional research. The project can involve trips to record oral history, to newspaper libraries, to a county record office. One student listened to US presidential cabinet tapes in an archive in Washington, DC. The Faculty wants to build a resource to help these projects.

One third of our Faculty’s students are postgraduates. In an era of mass higher education, students increasingly seek an edge by adding a postgrad qualification. There’s a strong accent on dissemination of research, on building networks, and sharing findings and methods with colleagues in other universities and countries. Humanities research is moving in a collaborative direction and students need to communicate globally. The Faculty seeks to help students create workshops and networks to bring together their peers.

A one-year Master’s course can be a standalone qualification or a foundation year for a PhD. We currently offer six different courses, in most fields of History. Our Faculty admits over 100 Master’s students a year. Half of them are non-British, as befits a global university. It’s very hard for UK students to find the means. Government funding has been all but abolished. Our Trust Funds are doing what they can. We would like Alumni and Friends to provide bursary support to help those who can’t afford a Master’s qualification.

If you give:

You can either earmark your donation to one of these purposes, or leave it open for any of them.

If you wish, we will record your name on the Cambridge History Faculty’s website as a donor to the Alumni and Friends Fund.

We will update our website regularly to show how donations have worked hard for our students – who will themselves report their experiences.

It’s easy to make an online donation via the University’s Online Giving site. All gifts, large and small are very gratefully received.

Those who are considering making a major donation, especially to help endow teaching and research posts, may wish to have an informal discussion with the Chair of the Faculty.

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